Minstrels also called bards would memorize a vast number of songs, which they would retell and adapt to suit different occasions and audiences. Because ballads have been sung by so many different people in different places, they vary widely in their form and style. For example…. While ballads can be about any subject, they always tell a story, especially about a famous person or a love story.
They are also often sad, although they can be heroic, tragic, or comic as well. Ballads often include a repeated stanza, called a refrain, after every verse, similar to a chorus in a song.
Check out these ballads in both poetry and song for some real-life inspiration. You can find even more ballads in collections of these poets' work, some of which are recommended below. For example… Scottish ballads often involve supernatural elements like the Fairy Kingdom. In England, ballads honoring Robin Hood became extremely popular in the late s.
This is for two reasons: first, you have to come up with a story in addition to the actual words of the poem; second, ballads are usually much longer than other poems, since it takes time to lay out an entire story in poetic form. Because they take longer to write than other poems, ballads should only be undertaken when you have plenty of time to work on them. List of Terms Action. Ad Hominem. Alter Ego. APA Citation. Comic Relief. Deus ex machina. Double Entendre. Dramatic irony.
Since writers used lyrical ballads to tell their own stories rather than the stories and myths of a broader culture and because lyrical ballads were written rather than sung , the lyrical ballad was considered to be a more literary form than the traditional ballad. Thus, a writer might choose to write a lyrical ballad because the prestige of the form, combined with its association with the folk ballad, could give power to a commonplace story, placing a writer's own everyday life or observations alongside myths that were immortalized by traditional ballads.
The era of the lyrical ballad is considered to have been the apex of the ballad's literary prestige. While lyrical ballads are still written today, the ballad as a literary form began to lose its prestige during the Victorian era because of its increasing association with sentimentality.
This uptick in sentimentality accompanied the return of ballads to their musical roots; rather than poems about everyday life, the term "ballad" began, in the 19th century, to connote something closer to its contemporary meaning, a slow love song. Contemporary ballads, like traditional ballads, use music to talk about love, but they have no strict meter or rhyme scheme. A writer today would be most likely to write a ballad out of the desire to tell an emotional story through song.
This, however, is just the most common usage of "ballad"—the term can still be used by poets to describe poetry that tells a story, regardless of its meter and rhyme. Ballad Definition. Ballad Examples. Ballad Function. Ballad Resources. LitCharts Teacher Editions. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts.
The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of every Shakespeare play. Sign Up. Already have an account? Sign in. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. Literature Poetry Lit Terms Shakescleare. Download this entire guide PDF.
Teachers and parents! Struggling with distance learning? Our Teacher Editions can help. Ballad Definition What is a ballad? Some additional key details about ballads: The ballad is one of the oldest poetic forms in English. There are so many different types of ballad that giving one strict definition to fit all the variations would be nearly impossible. The simplest way to think of a ballad is as a song or poem that tells a story and has a bouncy rhythm and rhyme scheme.
Traditional ballads are written in a meter called common meter , which consists of alternating lines of iambic tetrameter eight syllables with lines of iambic trimeter six syllables. Many ballads have a refrain a line or stanza that repeats throughout the poem , much like the chorus of modern day songs. Ballad Pronounciation Here's how to pronounce ballad: Bal -lad Ballads, Meter, and Rhyme Scheme Ballads are a type of formal verse , meaning that they tend to have both strict meter and a defined rhyme scheme.
We provide more details about these terms on their own pages, but here's a quick guide: Meter : A pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables that creates the rhythm of lines of poetry. Each stress pattern is composed of repeating units da- dum , da- dum , da- dum , for example where each unit da- dum is called a foot.
There are different types of feet; for instance, an iamb is a foot with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable de- fine , while a trochee has the opposite: a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable Po -et. Poetic meters are defined by both the type and number of feet they contain. Rhyme scheme : Poems that make use of end rhymes rhymes at the end of each line , often do so according to a repeating, predetermined pattern. That pattern is called a rhyme scheme.
Rhyme schemes are described using letters of the alphabet, so that each line of verse that corresponds to a specific type of rhyme used in the poem is assigned a letter, beginning with "A. These variations can largely be broken up into three main categories that help define the evolution of the ballad: Folk ballads are traditional ballads such as "Tam Lin" and "Robin Hood" that existed as an oral and often musical tradition before they were recorded in written language.
These ballads are, therefore, typically not attributable to any one author.
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